The Guardian

Birds are not just diverse, vivid and extraordinary. They can also save our souls – let’s protect them

For most of my life, I didn’t pay attention to birds. Only in my 40s did I become a person whose heart lifts whenever he hears a grosbeak singing or a towhee calling, and who hurries out to see a golden plover that’s been reported in the neighbourhood, just because it’s a beautiful bird, with truly golden plumage, and has flown all the way from Alaska. When someone asks me why birds are so important to me, all I can do is sigh and shake my head, as if I’ve been asked to explain why I love my brothers. And yet the question is a fair one: why do birds matter?

My answer might begin with the vast scale of the avian domain. If you could see every bird in the world, you’d see the whole world. Things with feathers can be found in every corner of every ocean and in land habitats so bleak that they’re habitats for nothing else. Grey gulls raise their chicks in Chile’s Atacama desert, one of the driest places on Earth.

Unsustainable exploitation of the natural world threatens food and water security of billions of people, major UN-backed biodiversity study reveals

Human destruction of nature is rapidly eroding the world’s capacity to provide food, water and security to billions of people, according to the most comprehensive biodiversity study in more than a decade.

Such is the rate of decline that the risks posed by biodiversity loss should be considered on the same scale as those of climate change, noted the authors of the UN-backed report, which was released in Medellin, Colombia on Friday.

EU’s subsidy system, that benefits big farming rather than sustainability, needs to change to prevent ongoing collapse in birds and insect numbers, warn green groups

Europe’s crisis of collapsing bird and insect numbers will worsen further over the next decade because the EU is in a “state of denial” over destructive farming practices, environmental groups are warning.

If even oil companies accept human-caused global warming, why doesn’t everybody?

In a California court case this week, Judge William Alsup asked the two sides to provide him a climate science tutorial.

The plaintiffs are the coastal cities of San Francisco and Oakland. They’re suing five major oil companies (Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell, ConocoPhillips and BP) to pay for the cities’ costs to cope with the sea level rise caused by global warming. Chevron’s lawyer presented the science for the defense, and most notably, began by explicitly accepting the expert consensus on human-caused global warming, saying:

‘His blubber shook like Jell-o,’ says researcher of the attack on newborn orca by unrelated 32-year-old male

Scientists in the Canadian province of British Columbia have documented what is believed to be the first reported case of an orca whale killing an infant of the same species.

“We knew right away that this was a remarkable event,” said Jared Towers, a Cetacean researcher with Fisheries and Oceans Canada, of the encounter he and two colleagues witnessed in December 2016.

Mining for lignite - or brown coal - in Greece is a huge industry. Together with Germany and Poland, the country accounts for more than one-third of the world’s coal production. But for residents of villages in the extraction areas of West Macedonia, it has many impacts, from displacement to health problems. Photographs and research by Anna Pantelia

Thick dust suspended in the atmosphere makes it hard to see the sun over Ptolemaida, a city 500 kilometres north-west of Athens in the West Macedonia region, known for its brown coal (lignite) mines and power stations.

Kostas works as a guard for the state-owned Public Power Corporation (PPC), like his father before him. “My father died of cancer when I was 12,” he says. “Four other men from his shift lost their lives from cancer.”

Rescue operation under way to save 15 beached whales in Hamelin Bay near Augusta on state’s south-west coast

More than 150 whales have washed ashore in Western Australia, of which about 75 have died.

A rescue operation is under way in Hamelin Bay, near the town of Augusta on the state’s south-western tip, with volunteers and vets trying to keep the surviving short-finned pilot whales alive before deciding when to herd them out to sea. About 50 of the whales are on the beach and 25 are in the shallows.

Tony Burke says if the Greens back the plan, the ‘largest removal’ of a conservation area will be locked in for a decade

Labor has blasted the Greens for not lining up immediately behind their commitment to disallow controversial new marine park management plans proposed by the Turnbull government this week.

The shadow environment minister, Tony Burke, told Guardian Australia the government had been intent for four years “on the largest removal of area from conservation in history”.

Bravo, Mark Boyle – your world sounds very beguiling to an oldie like me (I left a troubled world behind. Now let me tell you how to fix it, 20 March). However, I’ve lost count of the number of times in my life that I have heard this siren song, but no one with any influence ever seems to listen or even wake up. But, as Mark says, we can try small remedies ourselves should we be lucky enough to have a garden. It reminds me of an old Canadian friend who was convinced he could protect his family from the coming apocalypse by buying a farm, until he realised he’d have to have a gun – and use it – to stop those less fortunate from taking what he had. Or the 1970s German bumper sticker that translated as “everyone wants to go back to Eden but no one wants to go on foot”.
Linda Marriott
North Hykeham, Lincolnshire

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A new study says that even in the ‘unrealistic’ event of a total halt to the flow of agricultural chemicals the damage will persist for 30 years

The enormous “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico will take decades to recover even if the flow of farming chemicals that is causing the damage is completely halted, new research has warned.

Anne Ruston says National Parks Association “engaged in a campaign to mislead the Australian people” after groups make public submissions on RFAs

The government has accused green groups of deliberately misleading the Australian people by raising concerns about the roll over of long term logging agreements.

Related: NSW Labor refuses to approve forestry agreements based on 'out-of-date' science

The patch of detritus is more than twice the size of France and is at least four times larger than previously estimated

An enormous area of rubbish floating in the Pacific Ocean is teeming with far more debris than previously thought, heightening alarm that the world’s oceans are being increasingly choked by trillions of pieces of plastic.

At a high-level talking shop for the global water industry in Brazil, river defenders and community activists - who are often murdered or criminalised for trying to protect their resources - have set up an alternative forum to share their stories

While presidents, royalty and corporate dignitaries gave speeches at a global conference in Brasil’s federal capital this week on the need to protect water sources, river defender Ageu Lobo Pereira was running for his life through the Amazon forest.

The head of the riverine communities of Montanha e Mangbal had been tipped off that assassins were preparing an ambush. They wanted to end his resistance to mines, deforestation and dams that threaten the Tapajós river.

Crowdfunded case claims offshore oil licences were granted illegally by the Guyanese government

Three major oil companies preparing to drill off the shores of Guyana, where a string of discoveries have sparked a rush for crude, are being challenged by a group of citizens who say their dash for oil is illegal.

Lawyers acting for the Guyanese campaigners are to lodge the latest challenge in a court in Guyana this week. They are funding the battle against oil giants Exxon Mobil, Hess Corporation and Nexen, a subsidiary of Chinese national oil, through the crowdfunding site CrowdJustice.

Tempsford, Bedfordshire: To us the entrance hole to the sett it is unfathomably small, for in our imaginations we big up the badger into a creature with the dimensions of a stripy bear

On a disused airfield where planes once lifted off on secret night missions to occupied Europe, animals roam the runways under cover of darkness. At one corner, badgers have mined a thicket of thorns with pickaxe claws and shovels for feet. Their sett is lodged among the bushes, its tunnels and chambers shored up and secured by pillars and rafters of roots. It has spread to the point where the mouth of the newest hole gapes out over the open airfield. A portal between day and night, a D-shape on its side, it slumbers in the sun, while, deep inside, curled-up animals dream of dusk, their babies still a couple of months away from emergence. The hole breathes out no sounds, no smells, nothing.

The entrance hole to the sett would represent a canyon to a rabbit, but to us it is unfathomably small, for in our imaginations we big up the badger into a creature with the dimensions of a stripy bear.

22 March 1960: A problem with which mankind is faced at the moment is how to adapt local fishing to local needs

Every development in the fishing industry to-day points to the fact that it is becoming world business.

Among the latest proposals for expansion is the employment of two former aircraft carriers which are to be converted into mother ships operating with fleets of trawlers working at sea. Fish factory ships are becoming more popular. Their crews not only catch fish in the trawl; they fillet it, process it, make fishmeal and liver oil, and finally deliver the fillets in deep frozen packages.

Plans ‘woefully inadequate’, party says – but it fears replacing some protections with none at all

The Greens have signalled that they might not back a move by Labor to disallow controversial new marine park management plans proposed by the Turnbull government, calling for time to consider their position.

The Greens’ healthy oceans spokesman, Senator Peter Whish-Wilson, told Guardian Australia on Thursday that if the new government plans were disallowed, “then we move from some protections to no protections, and the protections of our oceans have to rely on Labor winning government and the conservative major and minor parties not having the numbers to disallow whatever plans Labor put in place”.

Courtroom showdown in San Francisco pitted liberal cities against oil corporations, and saw judge host unusual climate ‘tutorial’

The science of climate change was on trial Wednesday when leading experts testified about the threats of global warming in a US court while a fossil fuel industry lawyer fighting a high-profile lawsuit sought to deflect blame for rising sea levels.

The hearing was part of a courtroom showdown between liberal California cities and powerful oil corporations, including Chevron, ExxonMobil, Shell and BP. San Francisco and Oakland have sued the world’s biggest fossil fuel companies, arguing that they are responsible for damages related to global warming.

Conservation groups produce analysis showing protection for 35m hectares of ocean will be downgraded

More than 35m hectares of “no-take” ocean will be stripped from Australia’s marine parks if plans released by the government go ahead, according to analysis commissioned by conservation groups.

The environment minister, Josh Frydenberg, released plans for 44 marine parks on Tuesday, claiming a “more balanced and scientific evidence-based approach to ocean protection”.

BirdLife says loopholes, exemptions, omissions and powers open to politicisation have been exploited

Some of Australia’s favourite birds are threatened with extinction and Australia’s environmental laws are failing to protect them, a new report by BirdLife Australia has found.

The report identified in the existing laws a slew of loopholes, exemptions, omissions and discretionary powers open to politicisation, each of which have been exploited to allow the decline of birds including the Carnaby’s black cockatoo, the swift parrot and the southern black-throated finch.